Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and teacher Brooke Holiday returns to canvas with a new body of work exploring intimacy, impermanence and the elastic nature of time.
Words HANDE RENSHAW Photos PHILIPPA MUSSO
Brooke Holiday is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and teacher.
‘I'm drawn to things that heighten a feeling and leave room for emotion, nostalgia and unresolved states of being,’ shares Brooke Holiday.
‘Teaching has been a valuable extension of my creative practice, and I think each of those roles connects through a shared interest in curiosity, embodiment and community.’
“I’m an incredibly sentimental person and much of the work comes from my own grappling with intimacy, impermanence, and the difficulty of accepting that everything is visiting.”
‘The repetition of words is an attempt to better understand timelines and time itself as a construct - something that is so interesting and so elastic to me,’ shares Brooke Holiday.
‘My practice has always been a way for me to process things I haven't necessarily been able to articulate.’
For Brooke Holiday, painting has always been a way of understanding what words can’t express, and her latest series is a deeply personal reflection on connection and the act of letting go.
After moving house four times in eighteen months and spending a stretch without a dedicated studio, Brooke, who also teaches art and Pilates, is painting with a renewed sense of urgency.
‘I’ve been in my current home and studio for almost two years now, and I think I have a much better appreciation for the cyclical nature of the creative process, as well as the conditions I need in order to access it. Having a sense of being grounded again has brought a real freedom to the way I’m working,’ she shares.
Some of Brooke’s earliest memories are of her grandmother’s studio, tucked beneath her house in the hills of Western Australia. There was always a space set up for Brooke beside the ceramic artist, ‘My grandmother had a way of creating alternate realities through magical thinking and elements of this mindset have definitely imprinted on me.’
Her parents, a carpenter and a teacher, also encouraged her curiosity for materials and making. ‘Our family home will always be an ongoing project for my father, and I have in me his appreciation for design, quest for harmony and love of restoration,’ Brooke says.
Brooke’s new body of work, To Bless The Space Between Us, borrows its title from a collection of poems by John O’Donohue. Across ten paintings, Brooke traces the progression of intimacy, using repeated words to explore time and the threshold between shifting emotional states.
‘I’m an incredibly sentimental person and much of the work comes from my own grappling with impermanence, intimacy and the difficulty of accepting that everything is visiting,’ she says.
It’s been some time since Brooke last worked on canvas. What began as small ‘scratch paintings’ grew in scale, with raw linen and ink pushing her towards a looser, more instinctive way of working.
‘It’s encouraged me to relinquish control and be more present in the process, responding to what the materials are doing rather than anticipating the outcome. A mirror for emotional processing really.’
Brooke is increasingly curious about how the meaning of an experience changes over time, something she will explore further when she begins studies in Therapeutic Arts Practice in 2027.
‘I feel like I'm in a pretty generative period at the moment. It feels expansive and exciting to be working in a way that's still so open-ended, where the possibilities of where an initial idea might lead are really uncharted.’
To stay up to date with Brookes’s work, visit her website or follow @brooke_holiday
